Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary

377 Pages·2010·3.78 MB·English

by  Joselyn M. Almeida (Editor)

Romanticism and the
Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary
136 Internationale Forschungen zur
Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
In Verbindung mit
Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich
Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim
Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität
Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität
Wien)
herausgegeben von
Alberto Martino
(Universität Wien)
Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer
Anschrift der Redaktion:
Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien
Romanticism and the
Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary
Edited by
Joselyn M. Almeida
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Cover image: Steven Folsom, “La Partida /The Parting Charge”
Cover design: Pier Post
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ISBN: 978-90-420-3032-9
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Acknowledgments

Not too long ago, writing about British Romanticism’s engagements with the
Hispanophone world seemed improbable. Yet against that improbability, the
scholarship and interest of Alan Richardson, Marilyn Gaull, Sonia Hofkosh,
Jeffrey Cox, Nanora Sweet, Charles Rzepka, Tim Fulford, Joel Pace, Lance
Newman, and Jeff Cass opened a space for this conversation, and to each I
am deeply grateful. Diego Saglia’s groundbreaking scholarship in this field
has continued to generate possibilities for researchers, and this collection
owes its genesis and coalescence to his work, generosity, and leadership.
As a result of Saglia’s interventions, many of the contributors here — from
places as distant as Oviedo, Amherst, Memphis, and Oxford — converged at
the “Transnational Identities” conference in Bologna organized by the North
American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) and the Centro
Interdisciplinare di Studi Romantici, Università di Bologna (CISR). The ex-
changes facilitated at that memorable meeting have given this project direction
and momentum. Prof. Dr. Norbert Bachleitner, IFAVL Series Editor for
Rodopi, Esther Roth, and Ernst Grabovszki have steered it from conception to
realization across time zones with understanding and dedication.
The materiality of the book owes much to the generous support of the
Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, Paul T. Kostecki, and the Dean
of Humanities and Fine Arts, Joel Martin, at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. I would also like to thank my colleagues Joseph Bartolomeo,
Stephen Clingman, Laura Doyle, and Arthur Kinney for their suggestions at
different points. Librarians Brian Shelbourne and Steven Folsom from the
UMass Image Collection Library lent their digital humanities expertise to
obtain the cover image from José Joaquín de Mora’s No me olvides (1824-5)
with the gracious assistance of librarians at the Columbia University Rare
Book and Manuscript Library. I am also grateful to Tom Broughton-Willett
for his professionalism, energy, and promptitude when it came time to do the
index.
Finally, this project would not be possible without the support of my family
and friends, and the faith, patience, and support of mi compañero, Martin.
Table of Contents

Joselyn M. Almeida
Introduction: Of Windmills and New Worlds 9

Part I: Theaters of Liberation

Diego Saglia
Iberian Translations: Writing Spain into British Culture, 1780–1830 25

Joselyn M. Almeida
‘Esa gran nación, repartida en ambos mundos’: Transnational
Authorship in London and Nation Building in Latin America 53

Tim Fulford
‘El Diablo’ and ‘El Ángel del Cielo!’: Thomas and Kitty Cochrane
and the Romanticisation of Revolution in South America 81

Alicia Laspra Rodríguez
Fictionalizing History: British War Literature and the
Asturian Uprising of 1808 109

Susan Valladares
‘He that can bring the dead to life again’: Resurrecting the
Spanish Setting in Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) and Remorse (1813) 133

Part II: Trades and Exchanges

Nanora Sweet
The Forest Sanctuary: The Anglo-Hispanic Uncanny in
Felicia Hemans and José María Blanco White 159

Rebecca Cole Heinowitz
The Spanish American Bubble and Britain’s Crisis
of Informal Empire, 1822–1826 183
8
Maria Eugenia Perojo Arronte
Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Exchange,
and the Idea of a Spanish ‘National’ Literature 213

Jeffrey Cass
Fighting Over the Woman’s Body: Representations of Spain
and the Staging of Gender 233

Cristina Flores
‘Imported (cid:86)eeds’: The Role of William Wordsworth in
Miguel de Unamuno’s Poetic Renewal 249

Part III: Vistas and Extensions

Jeffrey Scraba
‘Dear Old Romantic Spain’: Washington Irving Imagines Andalucía 275

M. Soledad Caballero and Jenn(cid:76)(cid:73)(cid:72)(cid:85) Hayward
‘An occasional trait of Scotch shrewdness’: Narrating Nationalism
in Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico 297

Jessica Damián
‘These Civil Wars of Nature’: Annotating South America’s
Natural and Political History in Maria Graham’s
Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824) 327

Fernando González Moreno and Beatriz González Moreno
(Re) Discovering Spain: English Travel(cid:79)ers
and the Belated Picturesque Tour 341

Notes on Contributors 361

Index 367
Joselyn M. Almeida

Introduction: Of Windmills and New Worlds

‘In the rhapsody of his imagination he has discovered a world of windmills,
and his sorrows are that there are no Quixotes to attack them’.
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

‘Thy World, Columbus, shall be free.’
Anna Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven

In his mordant reply to Burke’s famous lament over lost chivalry in
Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine evokes the figure of Don
Quijote, thereby linking the long-standing tradition of romance to the age of
revolution. As David Duff suggests, the connection between the two ‘is
almost taken for granted as one of the central facts of the literary history of
English Romanticism’, given the work of Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, and
others.1 Moreover, Paine’s allusion to Don Quijote also bespeaks the
recurrence of cultural symbols, discourses, and figures from the
Hispanophone world, such as Don Juan, Columbus, Cortés, Pizarro, and
Atahualpa that circulated in Romantic drama, poetry, and prose. These came
to signify the other two massive revolutions that commanded the interest and
creative investments of authors, that of Spain against Napoleon and the
Spanish American Wars of Independence.2 The Peninsular War, known in
Spanish historiography as the Guerra de Independencia (War of
Independence), reinvigorated the tradition of chivalry for writers such as
Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, and
Lord Byron. Simon Bainbridge writes: ‘In a period when Britain was taking
an increasingly active role in the conflict [...] romance and its associated
values provided a powerful construction of Britain’s role that would

1 David Duff, Romance and Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 2.
2 José Blanco White, discussed hereafter, was perhaps the first to perceive this connection.
Scholars in the field are also indebted to José Alberich’s Bibliografía Anglo-Hispánica,
1801-1850 (Oxford: The Dolphin Book Co, 1978) which catalogues a substantial corpus of
Anglo-Hispanic works.
10 Joselyn M. Almeida
influence the way in which the nation saw its global role for the rest of the
century’.3
The publication of Diego Saglia’s Poetic Castles in Spain: British
Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (2000) has firmly established Spain
as a ‘figurative nucleus of contradictions and tensions, or a “heterotopia”, one
of those places which, in Foucault’s definition, “suspect, neutralize, or invert
the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect”’.4 The
representation of Spanish settings, motifs, characters, and cultural
impersonations — Southey affects the mask of Don Manuel Alvarez
Espriella in Letters from England, for instance — can no longer be simply
attributed to individual artistic choices while ignoring the large-scale cultural
and historical engagement between Britain and the Hispanic world. Besides
analyzing the considerable Hispanophile oeuvre of Southey, Hemans, Scott,
and Byron and the influential circle of Holland House and Lord Holland,
Saglia extends the field through his analysis of works usually overlooked in
this context. Walter Savage Landor’s Count Julian (1812) suggests a
deconstruction of the ‘exotic medievalism of Southern Spain’ that so
attracted Southey, and reconfigures ideologies of patriotism; his discussion of
lesser-known works such as Laura Sophia Temple’s The Siege of Zaragosa
and Other Poems (1812), William Ticken’s Santos de Montenos; or Annals
of a Patriot Family. Founded on Recent Facts (1811), and Mary Russell
Mitford’s Blanch (1813) recovers the pervasiveness of Spain in British
Romantic poetry. ‘Fictions about Spain indeed negotiate — that is, reinvent,
propose, or abolish — ideals about the nation, established religion and the
church, reform and conservatism, the family, the woman question, and forms
of masculine or feminine subjectivity.’ 5 Prominent in these fictions are epic
types such as El Cid, who defeated the Moors (and Cid-like figures such as
King Pelayo), tragic Moorish queens, battles such as Roncesvalles, the
heroism of the Maid of Saragossa and Spanish women, and the extraordinary
valor of British soldiers. Through their work on Felicia Hemans, Susan
Wolfson, Nanora Sweet, and John-David López have also contributed
considerably to the consolidation of Spain as an object of knowledge for
Romanticists.
British Romantic writing about Spain can be considered as part ‘of the
new historical and political horizon and a new sense of the power of poetry to

3 Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 149.
4 Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 62.
5 Saglia, p. 60.